BIA Webinar - Funding and solving R&D challenges with NC3Rs, AstraZeneca and Actual Analytics

This week the BIA held a member webinar entitled ‘Funding and solving R&D challenges: scientific, commercial and animal welfare drivers behind NC3Rs and CRACK IT Challenges’, which presented a fascinating case study of innovative collaboration from the CRACK IT project.

Dr Kate Harris, programme manager at NC3Rs, began the webinar by overviewing CRACK IT challenges, an annual competition that funds collaboration between industry, academia, and SMEs to solve scientific problems identified by the bioscience sector. The scheme has been highly successful in connecting academics who are looking to maximise the practical applications of their research, with industry professionals looking for solutions to their major challenges.

Challenges are identified by sponsors from industry, such as the pharmaceutical, chemical, and consumer sectors, and are then pitched to the wider scientific community to solve. Academics and SMEs from the EU then apply for a research contract of up to £1 million, to solve the full challenge over three years. The successful team works closely with NC3Rs who provide the funding, and the industry sponsors who provide access to data, expertise, and compounds, to develop their solution. A business growth scheme is also in place to support commercialisation of the end product, and maximise its scientific benefit.

Launched in 2011, CRACK IT has so far initiated 28 challenges, with £19.7 million committed and 24 organisations acting as sponsors to date. Many of these challenges have been completed, and several already have produced products that are commercially available today.

The focus of this webinar was the Rodent Big Brother Challenge, set by AstraZeneca in 2011, to develop a novel rodent home cage monitoring system for improved safety pharmacology assessment during drug development. Dr Will Redfern, Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca, summarised the key reason for setting this challenge: an unmet need for automated 24/7 monitoring of activity, behaviour, and temperature of group housed rodents in toxicology studies. The conventional methods at the time often could only take snapshot data measurements of temperature, required manual observation of behaviour, and required single housing to track activity.

This challenge was picked up by Actual Analytics, who won the CRACK IT funding award to develop a solution. Professor Douglas Armstrong, Chief Scientific Officer of AA, summarised the developmental process of their solution – Rodent Big Brother. The modified AstraZeneca home cage has an infrared camera, an RFID-reading base, and a data capture computer able to record 24/7 data of individual RFID chipped rodents, even when housed in a group.

This ingenious solution proved to be highly successful, meeting all of the fundamental criteria set out by AstraZeneca when launching the challenge. After further validation there will likely be numerous and widespread applications of this new technology in academic research and drug discovery.

This case study was a great example of how CRACK IT challenges can act as an exciting mechanism for producing novel solutions to major problems by connecting academia and SMEs with industrial sponsors. With the 2017 CRACK IT challenge competitions having just been announced, we urge everyone to check out their website and take a look. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

A full recording of the webinar can be found here